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These are approaches which do not involve numbers. Often the topic does not lend itself to quantifying – for example, when we are interested in studying people’s belief‐systems, or feelings. Sometimes the conventional approaches to sampling are not possible or do not make sense and therefore we chose a different approach from the ones described above. There are very many qualitative approaches, but for simplicity, I shall focus on the three most commonly used approaches.

1 Grounded Theory: Grounded Theory was developed by Barley Glaser and Anselm Strauss. Their book The Discovery of Grounded Theory was written at a time (1968) when there were very few academic books on qualitative research, other than ethnographic ones. Their aims in writing this book were to provide research students with a textbook to cite in defence of their qualitative approach, and to challenge the orthodox dominance of quantitative researchers in social sciences. They had conducted studies of death and dying in US hospitals – which is where I came into contact with them (I was working on the Life Before Death study and we wrote to ask them for any advice they could give – see Chapter 8). They describe an approach in which theory arises from and develops from the data as it is collected – for example, from observations, interviews, etc. I shall go into depth in these in the Chapter 14.

2 Ethnographic approaches: Ethnographic approaches have their roots in Anthropology. In particular, the work of early anthropologists to document and analyse societies and cultures in the developing world. The most common practice in this sort of research was for the researcher to go to a particular society and study it – as a participant observer. This meant living with and being part of the system that they are studying. By immersing themselves into and observing the life of that group of people and the events which happened to them – including the sense, or meaning that they attributed to them – they were able to try to make sense of that social system, So, what's this got to do with modern healthcare? Well, this approach has been adapted to researchers getting involved with particular social groups or situations – such as being admitted to hospital, working in care homes, etc., in order to get an ‘insider’ view of the experience and what is going on (see Chapter 11).More common, now, is to try to make sense of the cultural aspects of a group or situation by interviewing people – either individually or in focus groups – to capture their beliefs and practices. I shall go into depth and provide some rich examples of these in the Chapter 12.

3 Phenomenological approaches: Note how we are progressing to bigger and more difficult to pronounce terms! Sorry about that, but we need to be able to understand what others are saying, so I shall try to explain their meanings. First, let's try pronouncing the term:

Phen – om – en – ol – ogy

That's right. Try practising it a few times to get the hang of it. (I still stumble over this one occasionally!)

Phenomenology is the study of people's ‘lived experiences’. So, if we want to understand what people's experiences of an aspect of healthcare are, and the sense, or meaning, they attribute to these, then we are in the business of doing phenomenology. We usually do this using in‐depth interviews to access people's experiences. There are two schools of phenomenology – descriptive and interpretive phenomenology, but we'll wait until Chapter 13 before getting into the detail.

There are more variations of qualitative research, but I don't pretend to understand them all – and you don't have to.